Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

by Lucy Jones

For most of our evolutionary history, humans lived in small groups. Mothers lived in small social communities. Crucially, this meant that they mothered alongside others. Over hundreds of thousands of years, women foraged, together, with their babies close by. Our brains, our nervous systems, evolved in collective child-rearing societies. For millennia, mothers relied on the help of others to rear infants. Research undertaken by the primatologist and anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy suggests that women needed help simply to feed a baby and ensure its survival through childhood. A lone foraging woman would not have been able to supply the ten to thirteen million calories a human child would need to eat before it could find food independently.[33] So wherever they safely could, human mothers handed babies over to alloparents—“other” parents or fathers.[34] They weaned children early, swaddled them and hung them from doors. Mothers in foraging societies across the world still do.